


Changes in Matter

by Strange_Archivist



Series: Everything, Every Things [5]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: El and Max should be friends, F/M, Gen, The kids are all friends, These people deserve to be happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-13
Updated: 2017-11-13
Packaged: 2019-02-01 00:13:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12693066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Strange_Archivist/pseuds/Strange_Archivist
Summary: "But how do you catch the gas?" El asks, envisioning someone standing over a steaming pot of milk, desperately trying to catch the clouds of steam. It seems highly inefficient.The kids and Max specifically try to address obvious gaps in El's knowledge and experience with junk food. Joyce and Hopper enjoy some coffee and contemplation.





	Changes in Matter

**Author's Note:**

> Super fluffy kid's friendship piece with slight mileven, lumax, and jopper if you squint. Because these people deserve to be happy, damnit.

It's not often that they can have these big group get-togethers. Actually, they haven't really had one of this size yet. Most of the kids have gone to the cabin in shifts. Mike and Will on a Tuesday afternoon here, Lucas and Max and Dustin on a Friday evening there. Lucas and Mike and Max on a Sunday morning, Dustin and Will on a random Thursday. And so on. Hopper tries to get them to space out their visits and get them to be at different times and days so as to not draw too much attention. He knows that few people really watch what kids their age get up to all that closely, but those bad men... well, they might.

So it's a risk, and he realizes that because it's a risk, he's probably being grumpier than is really fair to these kids who are mostly pretty innocent. Aside from their plotting to set fire to inter-dimensional tunnels and raising demon-beasts and their incessant swearing (when did kids get mouths like this? Jesus), they're still kids and want to do mostly kid things like play games and goof around and watch silly movies. It's just, does their goofing around have to be... so. LOUD?

He gets through about five minutes of their exuberance before he needs a break, which he figures has got to be some sort of damn record. Mornings are for coffee and contemplation, after all. He's told El this. He fixes another pot of coffee for himself, pours a cup, and grabs his cigarettes and his jacket, figuring the February cold out on the cabin's porch likely won't be so bad if he bundles up, has some hot coffee, and has some damn peace and quiet.

He's just stepping out of the cabin and into the brisk air when he runs into-

"Joyce."

"Oh hey," she says, a bit flustered. "Sorry, didn't mean to startle you, I just realized Will left his coat in the car and I wasn't sure if the kids were going to play outside at all."

"I usually prefer they don't, but the alternative is chaos inside so." He jerks his head at the door to the cabin, Dustin and Lucas helpfully illuminate his point by seeing who can shout the longest ("No it DOESNNNNNNNNNN'T!" - "Yes it DOOOOOOEEESSSS!"). "So I'm escaping."

"Ah," Joyce smiles, but her eyes don't crinkle the way they used to. He wonders if they ever will again. She's made of far tougher stuff than him, he knows. She's been melted down and hardened in a way he's not sure he could be. But he worries that this time maybe made her a bit more brittle. And he can't stand the idea of a breakable Joyce.

He motions at the cup of coffee in his hand. "Want some? I got a whole rest of the pot inside. Doctor says I have to cut down, so you'd really be doing me a favor."

"Sure."

He ducks inside to grab another mug and the coffee pot long enough to see a Millennium Falcon sail through the air.

"What'd I say about throwing shit in here?!" he shouts.

The toy stops mid-air, then gently settles on the nearby kitchen table.

"Not throwing," El says brightly. "Lev-levitating."

"Hmph."

"Sorry, Chief," Dustin says. "Just testing a theory. For science."

She _had_ to make friends with a group of nerds.

"Yeah, just make sure we've still got a standing house when you're done."

 

* * *

 

 

El can hardly believe her luck. All her friends together, with her. And they don't have bad men or interdimensional beasts to figure out how to ward off. They have the whole day to drink hot chocolate and play games and eat pizza and watch movies. Lucas says this is how they'll spend most of their weekends once it's safe for her to live a more normal life. It sounds luxurious to her.

She looks around the room again after Hopper heads back outside with another mug and the full pot of coffee. All her friends. All her friends and... Max.

She's still not sure how she feels about Max. She hasn't forgotten the way the redhead made Mike smile or the bolt of jealousy she'd felt in the pit of her stomach watching them together in the gym. But the time she's spent with them since has clued her into the fact that Mike obviously doesn't want to go to any snowballs with Max and vice versa.

Even if there _was_ something... something _like that_ going on between Mike and Max, El thinks she might still have trouble not liking Max. Max is, well, Max is cool, and different. And super smart. And El likes the way Max makes Lucas smile too.

Still, she hasn't quite been able to make friends with this girl the way she did with the boys. Maybe it's because of how El brushed her off that first night. Maybe it's because Max is rough and tumble in a way none of the boys are (even though the TV says they should be). Or maybe it's because El now understands that making friends isn't really as easy as running into a group of kids in the rain. And she doesn't have the sort of understanding with Max that she has with Will.

They're passing around the mug of coffee Dustin had poured on Lucas's dare before Hopper had retrieved it and Will is saying, "ugh, is it really that bad?"

"Here, you try it!" Dustin shoves the mug into the smaller boy's hands. 

Will promptly spits his sip out and winces, screwing up his face against the bitter liquid.

"Gross!" Will says.

"Yeah, it must be. You look like you're constipated," Lucas jokes.

"Ew!" Mike exclaims.

"You try it then!" Dustin insists. "It was your idea!"

Lucas keeps his sip down, but clearly doesn't enjoy it.

"You guys are doing it wrong," Max says, rolling her eyes and swiping the cup from Lucas. She takes a sip and frowns, but hangs onto the cup and turns to the kitchen.

She rummages through the cabinets until she finds the sugar and dollops two spoonfuls of it into the drink. She then finds the milk in the fridge and pours some of that into the mug too. She then finds the salt, gives it one shake over the mug before setting it down again and stirring up the contents of the mug.

Max then takes another sip. "Much better," she says. "What?" she says, catching them all staring. "It's how my mom takes hers. The coffee's bitter so the salt helps it taste less bitter, the sugar makes it sweet, the milk cools it down so you don't burn your tongue." She takes a long swig then notices them all still staring. "I'm not saying I get why people call it 'the best part of waking up' or anything, but it's not bad really."

"Yeah well, I need to get that taste out of my mouth," says Dustin, sticking his tongue under the faucet.

"Dude, put the water in a cup like a civilized human being," Lucas admonishes. Dustin sticks his tongue out at Lucas.

"We can make hot chocolate," El offers, who will take any excuse to make the drink.

Mike helps her by pouring the milk into a pot, and Max hands her the sugar. El digs the cocoa out of the back of the cabinet. Hopper must have unsuccessfully tried to hide it from her again. There's only just enough left to make the one pot. Well, just enough if she makes this pot extra chocolatey. She likes it extra chocolatey.

"Do you have any evaporated milk?" Will asks. "My mom makes it with evaporated milk."

"Oh yeah!" Dustin exclaims. "Mrs. Byers makes the best hot chocolate. Makes it really creamy."

"Evaporated milk?" El asks.

"Yeah," Mike says. "Like you know how you read that book that talked about how liquid can freeze and become a solid, or evaporate and become a gas."

She knows the word evaporated. She'd read that whole book, "Changes in Matter" front to back, especially loving the illustrations of ice forming and snowflakes. But the idea of evaporated milk sounds strange based on what she's read.

"But how do you catch the gas?" El asks, envisioning someone standing over a steaming pot of milk, desperately trying to catch the clouds of steam. It seems highly inefficient. Lucas and Dustin look at her the way they looked at her when she shut the door with her powers. Like she has two heads.

"Oh, it's not - it's not like that," Mike says, catching her meaning. "It's, well, I don't really cook. It, uh- I think it comes in a can? I don't know what it is exactly." He looks to Will for a better explanation, who, based on his shrug, doesn't seem to know either.

Max does though. "It's sort of a misnomer. It's not the evaporated bits that's in evaporated milk, its the stuff that's left over after they boil the milk. That's probably why Dustin thinks it tastes better in hot chocolate. It's basically creamier because they boiled a lot of water out of it."

"Right," Dustin says.

"Oh like you knew," Max says, rolling her eyes.

"Hey, I know it tastes better, and that's what's most important!"

"Alright, that's fair."

Max _is_ super smart. But El likes that she's not mean about it. She never feels dumb when Max explains something to her. She checks the cupboards, but isn't surprised to find nothing that seems at all like canned milk of any kind. "Sorry, no evaporated milk," El says to Dustin and Will.

"Somehow I think we'll live," Mike says, reaching for the cinnamon.

They dole out the hot chocolate, Max taking hers in addition to the half cup of coffee she's still got left. She takes an experimental sip and brightens. "Mmm. I think I found a whole new level of hot chocolate. Wanna try?" She offers the cup to El.

El takes a sip and her eyes widen. It  _is_ a little bitter, the way she's known coffee was since Hopper let her try, but sort of bitter in a good way. It's richer, almost even more chocolatey, which El hadn't really thought was possible. It's like the chips they put in the chocolate chip cookies. Bittersweet, the label on the bag had read.

"Good, right?" Max says, smiling at her reaction.

"Would be good with eggos," El says.

"And whipped cream," Max agrees. "Or marshmallow fluff." Somehow, that simple statement feels like a change to El. It solidifies something that had previously felt so fluid, so... so gaseous and intangible to her and she thinks maybe Max has forgiven her for the slight against her that first night they met. Or maybe she never held it against her to begin with. Maybe she's just wanted to be her friend all along and El's just made things way more difficult in her mind than they had to be because she can't believe things are so good now. Maybe.

"Stop it, you're making me hungry," Dustin complains.

They all spend the rest of the morning thinking up increasingly bizarre combinations of drinks and junk food and then daring each other to eat the creations they have the ingredients for. Some are better than others. Some are just downright terrible, and some are overly sweet. Later, she doesn't remember the taste of the food as much as she remembers the feel of Mike's hand in hers, or how hopeful Max's offer to teach her to skateboard made her feel for the future.

**Author's Note:**

> I myself had a lot of confusion over what evaporated milk was for longer than I really should have. I remember being about 10 or so and thinking my mom was trying to make a joke, asking an employee at our grocery store if they had evaporated milk, because how could you put something evaporated into a can? I was not a Hawkins lab experiment, just a really literal-minded kid.
> 
> Anyway, hope you enjoyed, please leave me a comment!


End file.
